Hospitals and healthcare institutions as well as the other organizations that work with them are facing the need to become better connected. The effort involves an array of technologies that must share health information and coordinate care among hospitals, physicians, and patients. Interoperability helps providers exchange information by enabling diverse systems to work together. From the healthcare perspective, interoperability specifically involves data exchange, infrastructure interoperability, and user interface interoperability. In a recent whitepaper covering these topics, Siemens addresses the interoperability challenges that institutions face.

Solid foundations
Healthcare IT solutions like Soarian^® and INVISION^® are essential parts of a solid functioning IT infrastructure. These applications both provide and act on data that is exchanged; for instance, prescriptions sent to a retail pharmacy, results received from a lab system, or packaged clinical data. Both the Soarian and INVISION applications support e-prescribing as a way to send prescriptions electronically to the retail or mail-order pharmacy. Additionally, Siemens offers solutions that enable the electronic flow of vital patient information from medical devices into the enterprise patient health record. Such interoperability solutions work with healthcare IT industry standards to enable communications with non-Siemens systems and devices.

Siemens also offers technologies that enhance the entire system by streamlining workflow, thereby helping to create more efficient and effective processes. For instance, with mobile device interoperability, Soarian Critical Care assists clinical staff by collecting continuous patient data from various critical care bedside devices. Soarian Device Connect helps clinicians reduce the number of manual steps involved in the process of vital signs data collection. Such mobile device support can help reduce human error and make patient data available to healthcare providers more quickly.

A complete package
In all its forms, interoperability is critical to the efficiency and accuracy of the entire healthcare system. In the future, providers will face increasing pressure to both share and receive data. Enhanced interoperability is a key factor in supporting provider initiatives for improving patient outcomes and clinical satisfaction and for helping to reduce provider inefficiencies and medical costs.